Keeping the Flame Alive 325Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without writtenmore staff went unassigned. By late 2000, hiring was frozen, and the turnover rate
dropped to about 2% as competitors no longer hired skilled staff away.
In an attempt to shore up their finances, SMSI stopped funding all activities that
did not directly contribute to revenue. Development of knowledge materials for training
and indoctrination work was curtailed, particularly as virtually no new staff was joining
the company. KM programs, while believed important, were carried as an overhead
expense to the firm, and the financial support was withdrawn.
The nonfinancial incentives for participating dried up as well, as staff became more
concerned about maintaining their own positions than assisting others for the good of
the firm. There was great pressure to “tend to one’s own garden,” and use whatever time
was available to develop leads for potential projects, rather than participating in the
Colleagues program. Indeed, this was a rational perspective, as a series of layoffs
dropped the payroll to 7,200 by 2001.
By mid-2001, much of the KM program, including the Knowledge Colleagues
program, had been dismantled. Ms. Johnson left SMSI to join a new consultancy firm that
specialized in knowledge management, along with many of her staff. The KM program
continued at a much smaller scale, focusing on market intelligence and skill building for
the SMSI staff.
Lessons Learned
The final straw for the KM system was the weakness in SMSI’s markets, and the
reaction of its management to reduce funding. This was not in the scope of control of the
KM managers. Nevertheless, there are several elements that may be taken away from the
case.
- More is not always better. Developing a community of knowledge-sharing staff
was a particular concern to SMSI’s KM managers. To this end, their program
emphasized a broad-based, inclusive approach that encouraged participation and
knowledge sharing. After some time, however, the quality of the knowledge shared
was not equal to the quantity that was available. This perception of dropping
quality may have contributed to the program’s later weakness. This problem would
become more visible as the collection of accepted knowledge grew. A more
selective process for accepting contributions, along with a process of vetting and
reviewing the content of the system, might have mitigated. - Monitoring usage. Integrating a usage or rating scale into the knowledge system
would have assisted in identifying materials that were outdated or not widely
applicable. More modern KM systems than that available at SMSI recognize this
need, and assign weights to materials that have been evaluated by the users as
useful or not. Examples where this is present include the customer service sites at
Symantec and Microsoft, which ask users to rate the usefulness of retrieved items. - Recognizing the stakeholders. While the SMSI program clearly recognized the
needs of junior consultants and managers, it was less successful in developing the
same kind of respect among partners, who ultimately paid for the system. For this
group, the anecdotal evidence that the KM program was useful was not sufficient
to continue its funding as the financial position of SMSI worsened. In comparison,
a competitor firm spent considerable effort developing marketing and prospect
management knowledge bases for the partners. When faced with the same declin-